New Zealand Music Month is about showcasing Kiwi tunes and celebrating home-grown talent on our airwaves and stages. Each May, Music Month highlights and promotes local music and since it began in 2001, sales of New Zealand music have more than doubled and airtime for New Zealand music on commercial radio stations has also doubled.

This month www.nzhistory.net.nz harks back to Aotearoa’s musical roots with 31 reasons to love New Zealand music.

Whether we’re punching above our weight, cutting down tall poppies or mumbling the words to ‘God Defend New Zealand’, stories such as those of Kiwi Rock Royalty Split Enz or our 61-year-old New Zealand Symphony Orchestra are a musical history to be proud of.

Ruru Karaitiana wrote ‘Blue Smoke’ in 1940 on the troop ship Aquitania, off the coast of Africa while serving in the Māori Battalion. In 1949 the song featured on the first record wholly produced in New Zealand.

Back in the day when the Tui Awards were the Loxene (Shampoo) Golden Disc Awards, Sandy Edmonds, a Liverpool-born dental assistant, rose to become the swinging, groovy Paris Hilton of the 1960s.

Kiwi Records was the ‘saviour of New Zealand composers’ when Publisher A.H. & A.W. Reed started the label in 1957. Nearly the only local outlet for recording classical music, it also churned out LPs like ‘Steam militant!’ and ‘A Treasury of New Zealand Bird Song’. The ‘romance and utility of railways’ perhaps inspired the iconic ‘Taumarunui (on the main trunk line)’.

New Zealanders have had huge successes in the charts. ‘Poi E’ had four weeks at number one in 1984, Blam Blam Blam had a runaway hit in 1981 with ‘There is no depression in New Zealand’ and OMC’s ‘How Bizarre’ remains the biggest-selling New Zealand record. These are immortalised in the media gallery on www.nzhistory.net.nz alongside other classic images, videos and sound clips.

For more Music Month mania, check out events on NZLive.com and for a gig guide, news, competitions, text and email updates go to www.nzmusicmonth.co.nz .

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Events, National identity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.